[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Simon Biggs]

Hi Magnus

You reflect upon your experiences in community building and distributed
creativity in both the UK and Germany. A lot of the discussion this month
has, perhaps due to the locations of some of the guest discussants, focused
on particular examples of such activity. But of course this activity happens
all over the world and in all sorts of cultural contexts. James's
contributions last week addressed some of these diverse examples.

I am very interested in how people come together and identify themselves as
having shared interests and creative aims not only in different cultural
contexts but also across cultural contexts. An well known early example of
this was the 7-11 list serve and the group of artists involved with that.
They came from both sides of what had been one of the world's great divides,
the Iron Curtain (that term sounds so archaic now) and were operating in a
context of flux as cultures that had been artifically seperated
re-negotiated their relations. But across these differences they also had
some things very much in common and were clearly driven to engage these
factors collectively. That was a very specific historical moment.

The Yasmin list serve is another, quite different, example, seeking to
engage people's around the Mediterranean Sea, in Africa, Europe and the
Middle East in discourse about new media communications and its impact
across cultures. Yasmin operates across cultural differences that are of our
age and which sometimes seem to be increasing rather than decreasing, if one
considers mainstream political rhetoric.

7-11 seemed to be genuinely emergent from a certain milieu of people shaped
by events. It didn't seem to be a planned thing. Yasmin has an agenda and a
vision that drives it. They are both transcultural but very different
examples of how communities form across/within different kinds of
difference.

I have mentioned two examples in passing but I know there are those on
empyre who have greater experience and deeper understanding of these and
other examples. Ruth has asked Magnus to consider how things like CHiT
interacted with local communities and this is clearly a key factor in
Furtherfield's agenda. I'm looking forward to Magnus's reply on this. But,
within this context, it might also be valuable to draw out some of our
experiences on empyre that are concerned with the transcultural, whether
geographically specific, like Green Lanes in London, or distributed.

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
Skype: simonbiggsuk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
http://www.elmcip.net/
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts


> From: magnus lawrie <magnus at ditch.org.uk>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:14:13 +0100
> To: <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org>, soft_skinned_space
> <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
> 
> Ah yes, I was aware of such places during time spent in Germany, when
I also,
> shall I say, 'toured' such spaces as CBase
(http://www.c-base.org/) ...somehow
> I was always crossing over into
these kind of cultures, but until I got active
> with ChIT I wasn't too
conscious of this. It seems to me there was some
> special coming
together of individuals that allowed me to build on all my
> previous
experience at that time. As a consequence I attended things such
> as
FreeBitFlows (http://freebitflows.t0.or.at/) and (perhaps
> somewhat
ludicrously) stumbled into other conferences and workcamps,
> without
knowing exactly what my purpose was
> (e.g.
http://third.oekonux-conference.org/,
http://www.freifunknet.dk/djurslan
> dsnet.htm).



Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201